Africa Wo/Man Palava

Africa Wo/Man Palava
Author: Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 372
Release: 1996-04-15
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9780226620855

Ogunyemi uses the novels to trace a Nigerian women's literary tradition that reflects an ideology centered on children and community. Of prime importance is the paradoxical Mammywata figure, the independent, childless mother, who serves as a basis for the postcolonial woman in the novels and in society at large. Ogunyemi tracks this figure through many permutations, from matriarch to writer, her multiple personalities reflecting competing loyalties. This sustained critical study counters prevailing "masculinist" theories of black literature in a powerful narrative of the Nigerian world.

Author:
Publisher: Human Rights Watch
Total Pages: 59
Release:
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Anglophone African Detective Fiction 1940-2020

Anglophone African Detective Fiction 1940-2020
Author: Matthew J. Christensen
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Total Pages: 245
Release: 2024-03-19
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1847013872

Providing a survey of Anglophone African detective fiction, from the late 1940s to the present day, this study traces its history both as a literary form and a mode of critical exploration of the fraught sovereignties of the African state and its citizens. Since the late 1940s, African writers including Cyprian Ekwensi, Arthur Maimane, Adaora Lily Ulasi, Hilary Ng'weno, Unity Dow, Parker Bilal, and Angela Makholwa have published over 200 murder mysteries, police procedurals, spy thrillers, and other fictional narratives of investigation and discovery in English-language newspapers, magazines, and novels. Distributed widely across the continent's diverse cultural and political geographies, these texts share aesthetic characteristics and thematic preoccupations that reflect transnational networks of production, circulation, and influence. Anglophone African Detective Fiction, 1940-2020 surveys this literary history and examines how African writers have repeatedly harnessed the detective story to interrogate postcolonial realities of selfhood and the state. It argues that African writers have turned the detective story into a highly productive, while at the same time suspense-filled and entertaining, mode of social and political critique, first of colonialism and the independence era and latterly of neoliberal governance. Offering an overview of paradigmatic texts, from Ghana to Kenya and Sudan to South Africa, the book traces the contours of the history of Anglophone African detective fiction that is at once a cultural history of a uniquely African assessment of the ongoing problematics of sovereignty and decolonization.

The African Palimpsest

The African Palimpsest
Author: Chantal Zabus
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2007-01-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9401204551

Uniting a sense of the political dimensions of language appropriation with a serious, yet accessible linguistic terminology, The African Palimpsest examines the strategies of ‘indigenization’ whereby West African writers have made their literary English or French distinctively ‘African’. Through the apt metaphor of the palimpsest – a surface that has been written on, written over, partially erased and written over again – the book examines such well-known West African writers as Achebe, Armah, Ekwensi, Kourouma, Okara, Saro–Wiwa, Soyinka and Tutuola as well as lesser-known writers from francophone and anglophone Africa. Providing a great variety of case-studies in Nigerian Pidgin, Akan, Igbo, Maninka, Yoruba, Wolof and other African languages, the book also clarifies the vital interface between Europhone African writing and the new outlets for African artistic expression in (auto-)translation, broadcast television, radio and film.

The Novel in Africa and the Caribbean Since 1950

The Novel in Africa and the Caribbean Since 1950
Author: Simon Gikandi
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 608
Release: 2016
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 019976509X

The Novel in Africa and the Caribbean since 1950 examines the institutional and social peculiarities that make fiction produced in Africa and the Atlantic World since 1950 important to the history of the novel in English.

The Nostalgic Drum

The Nostalgic Drum
Author: Femi Osofisan
Publisher: Africa World Press
Total Pages: 372
Release: 2001
Genre: African literature (English)
ISBN: 9780865438064

A collection of essays by Femi Osofisan, the internationally respected Nigerian dramatist and poet, who is widely hailed as one of Africa's leading writers of the generation following on from Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe. With acerbic wit and with idealistic fervour, Osofisan speaks in these essays about the place of literature and drama, and those who consume it, in the troubled post-colonial continent that is Africa. The result is a passionate and original insight, not only into the work of his contemporaries, but also into the adventure of the Africa of the past.

Who's Who in Contemporary Women's Writing

Who's Who in Contemporary Women's Writing
Author: Jane Eldridge Miller
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 416
Release: 2019-07-23
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1136214305

Unique in its breadth of coverage, Who's Who in Contemporary Women's Writing is a comprehensive, authoritative and enjoyable guide to women's fiction, prose, poetry and drama from around the world in the second half of the twentieth century. Over the course of 1000 entries by over 150 international contributors, a picture emerges of the incredible range of women's writing in our time, from Toni Morrison to Fleur Adcock- all are here. This book includes the established and well-loved but also opens up new worlds of modern literature which may be unfamiliar but are never less than fascinating.

A History of Twentieth-century African Literatures

A History of Twentieth-century African Literatures
Author: Oyekan Owomoyela
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 428
Release: 1993-01-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780803286047

African literatures, says volume editor Oyekan Owomoyela, "testify to the great and continuing impact of the colonizing project on the African universe." African writers must struggle constantly to define for themselves and other just what "Africa" is and who they are in a continent constructed as a geographic and cultural entity largely by Europeans. This study reflects the legacy of colonialism by devoting nine of its thirteen chapters to literature in "Europhone" languages—English, French, and Portuguese. Foremost among the Anglophone writers discussed are Nigerians Amos Tutuola, Chinua Achebe, and Wole Soyinka. Writers from East Africa are also represented, as are those from South Africa. Contributors for this section include Jonathan A. Peters, Arlene A. Elder, John F. Povey, Thomas Knipp, and J. Ndukaku Amankulor. In African Francophone literature, we see both writers inspired by the French assimilationist system and those influenced by Negritude, the African-culture affirmation movement. Contributors here include Servanne Woodward, Edris Makward, and Alain Ricard. African literature in Portuguese, reflecting the nature of one of the most oppressive colonizing projects in Africa, is treated by Russell G. Hamilton. Robert Cancel discusses African-language literatures, while Oyekan Owomoyela treats the question of the language of African literatures. Carole Boyce Davies and Elaine Savory Fido focus on the special problems of African women writers, while Hans M. Zell deals with the broader issues of publishing—censorship, resources, and organization.